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Tangential Software Usage

As you probably know I am working in a very small (3) team through internet. We do not share a physical place and we have very limited resources. All the infrastructure is based on servers we have at our own home (code repository, wiki, bug tracking service, build machines, web server, backup machines, NAS servers, etc). As you can imagine, we try to optimize our time and bandwidth as much as possible. I want to share with you in this post two examples of this optimizing philosophy with the idea of discussing them and discovering other interesting usages you may be doing (if you want to share of course)

• Twitter: I like to know where the rest of the team is working on. We have weekly voice meeting, we have emails and IM accounts but that is not enough to know with precision where each part is working on. Twitter, a micro-blogging service you probably know is ideal for this purpose. We have private twitter accounts (nobody out of the team can read it) where we update or current status: developing a new package, fixing a ticket, writing documentation, meeting a client, etc. With a simple look at your twitter account you get the status of the team.
• Dropbox: I am absolutely impressed with this software. If you don’t know about it I recommend that you have a look at its tutorial. The service is incredibly simple to use and it just works without problems. We have created a dropbox account for internal distribution and testing of our binary releases. Our build machine copy each generated distribution to a shared dropbox folder. This dropbox folder is shared with our team giving us the following advantages:
  • Every member on the team have the binaries everywhere and in all machines we want to test.
  • Logs for each execution are saved in the shared folder and are automatically synchronized in all the accounts. The logs give us useful information about the execution of the software that every developer can inspect.
  • Crashes are stored as minidumps in that same folder. And, as we distribute pdb with our releases, this means that everybody in the team can open any dump from any release and reproduce the exact crashing conditions everywhere. For more information about symbols, read my previous article about Setting up a Symbol Server

Do you have more interesting related ideas? Please, share them with us.